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“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is an English-language expression, one of whose meanings is that, having experienced an unpleasant surprise, you hesitate in anticipation of a follow-up. The proverbial BOHICA, as it were. It originates from tenement living in American cities of the 19th and early 20th Centuries where someone would get woken up by their upstairs neighbor coming home and taking their shoes off. After the loud thwack of the first shoe dropping on the floor, it was useless to try to go back to sleep until shoe #2 had followed suit.
This generally happened in short order, of course, as people don’t generally keep one shoe on when they come home at night.
But imagine the shoe dropped, and then the other shoe didn’t. All evening.
All week.
All month.
You’d probably go a little crazy waiting, right? I mean you’d definitely go crazy trying to stay awake for a week, much less a month, but here’s the Covid-19 pandemic, the dropped shoe that has all of us in a state of uncertainty. And we’re coping in different ways. Some are still insisting no shoe ever dropped in the first place, or both shoes have already dropped and we should all just get on with our lives.
This past weekend a lot of folks went to the beaches here in America, or in some states even went back to reopened restaurants and salons, and I really doubt the other shoe has dropped yet. Maybe they’ll be fine, but seriously, this virus ain’t nothing to mess with even if people aren’t dropping in their tracks a la The Stand. We’re still scrambling to figure out exactly what it can do and what it can’t and even if it doesn’t kill you it could leave you internally scarred for the rest of your life.
Is it fake news? Do we really want to take that chance, this soon? Just for a haircut? It seems like the kind of thing people are going to be shaking their heads at in hindsight, but hindsight is not shaping up to be 2020.
Maybe we’ve gussied up our apocalypses too much in fiction, to the point where when a real nastiness comes along we can’t even recognize it. I’m reminded of the 2011 tsunami in Japan where the videos showed none of the stereotypical towering walls of water sweeping in on the land. It was just water that would not stop coming, and coming, and coming, and by the time you realized that the ankle deep wash you were slogging through to get to wherever you needed to go had gotten up to your knees and then your thighs and then it was already too late and you were lost in the current. And 10 minutes later the water had built up enough it was higher than the first story of buildings, and the power was so intense those buildings were being ripped from their foundations and carried along like so many unwilling sailboats. And after all that was finally done, everything got sucked back out again. That was the other shoe dropping, and if you tried to go back home before it did you most likely ended up another casualty.
Natural disasters are at once something much less flashy and yet much more deadly than we come up with for books and movies. When I write about an apocalypse I’m concerned with good storytelling. Nature doesn’t care. Nature just wrecks face.